These two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real,
To trade in these wings on some wheels.
Climb in back
Heaven’s waiting on down the tracks.
Oh oh come take my hand,
Riding out tonight to case the promised land,
Oh oh Thunder Road
— Bruce Springsteen, “Thunder Road” (1975)
A glance at the abundance of stories set on the highway in various genres of American popular culture illuminates the desires encapsulated, but also the tensions inherent, in this space of discovery and becoming. Bruce Springsteen knew the spiritual measure of the road and made it a staple of his songwriting toolbox. The highway, for Springsteen, was the Exodus path. The car was the vehicle to the Promised Land. As Kate McCarthy has explained, though, the highway to the Promised Land, while remaining a central metaphor, has changed texture and mood over the course of Springsteen’s career, from an early vision of escape from the boredom and meaninglessness of small-town, working-class New Jersey to a later criticism of America’s failure to live up to its promises.
The transformation from hope to tragedy is as familiar a theme in American popular culture’s depictions of the highway as its converse. From Easy Rider to Thelma and Louise, the quest for freedom through movement has often ended in death and despair. Or is it a radical form of freedom that these texts teach? Thelma and Louise certainly leaves the ambivalence open. So do, in their own way, Bonnie and Clyde, another American archetype of the highway that influenced these and other films such as Natural Born Killers. Such films and characters are a reminder that the highway is also the space of the outlaw, the bandit, represented by motorcycle gangs who take the liberty to live according to their own rules of honor and community outside of the laws of the nation-state (for instance, see The Wild One, Hell’s Angels on Wheels, and Smokey and the Bandit.) They are twentieth-century pirates, portrayed as dangerous but radically free and fundamentally fair within their own world. They serve, then, in pop culture, as a critique of the material and social inequalities and the structures of domination and oppression that belie the American Dream. For all of their danger, violence, and refusal of the legal and social norms that guide mainstream American life, these outlaws and their stories figure prominently in the nation’s folklore. Like the sacred itself, according to theorists of religion, they are both appealing and terrifying, attractive and repulsive. And this, too, is part of the mystique of the highway as a spiritual technology that has the ability to take travelers to the edges of experience.
I cannot help but think that much of the spiritual power of the highway stems from the multiple tensions and contradictions that it embodies: the highway is a space of desire and danger, of freedom and violence, of individual autonomy and communal connection, of promise and pitfall, of industry and nature, of self and other, of stability and transience, of potential and limitation, of dreams and dirt. The structure of contradiction itself embodies a particularly American, and particularly modern, antagonism. It should not go unnoticed, for instance, that this particular spiritual technology is also destructive of the American Dream, inherently taking part in the industrial production and sales of automobiles and the overuse of fossil fuels. As so often happens, the pursuit of freedom and the real comes with great costs and unforeseen consequences.
But out on the highway old stories are inhabited, new stories emerge, and they blend together like the blur of the passing landscape as it mixes with the music on the radio. Throwing off the everyday, entering into the space of discovery and adventure, opening up to whatever possibilities and experiences come into play, the highway traveler is born anew.
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